5 myths about Google

Mario
Anzuoni/Reuters

Its search engine is so widely used that "Google" has become a
dictionary-approved verb, and the company makes virtually all of
its money by selling ads connected to search.

But Google's ventures into self-driving cars and balloons that
deliver Internet connectivity from the stratosphere show that
it's not just a search company.

Its long-term plan is to become an artificial-intelligence
company.

Google has built a research group around AI and machine learning,
and it even hired renowned AI guru Ray Kurzweil, who believes
that by 2045 humans will merge with computers in what's known as
"the Singularity."

Google's recent acquisitions speak to its intentions: British
company DeepMind, one of the most advanced AI development shops
in the world, plus eight of the world's best robotics companies.
Nobody knows what Google will do with all these robots and AI
software, but its ambitions certainly go well beyond self-driving
cars.

This work takes place inside Google X, the company's top-secret
research lab. A few hundred people work there, a tiny but potent
slice of Google's workforce of 53,600.

Google isn't alone in the quest to develop AI (Facebook also has
an AI research team), but it's one of the few organizations with
the brainpower and financial resources to make true artificial
intelligence a reality. Plus, AI is in its blood: Google
co-founder and chief executive Larry Page is the son of renowned
AI pioneer Carl Page, and he's personally funding a research
project to reverse-engineer the brain of a worm.

"Every time I talk about Google's future with Larry Page, he
argues that it will become an artificial-intelligence" company,
tech venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has said.

2) Google Glass was a failure.

Headlines proclaimed that Google Glass "flopped" and "failed"
after the company announced it would stop selling its goofy
$1,500 eyewear. As a consumer product, Glass was declared clunky,
too expensive and not useful.

But Glass shouldn't be measured only in terms of its commercial
success.

In the summer of 2013, I was among a group of "influencers"
invited to the Google campus to see some future products. Many of
the influencers showed up proudly sporting their Google Glass
eyewear — and looking like idiots. Not one of the Google
executives wore Glass.

REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage

That's because Google viewed Glass as an experiment, a way to
explore wearable computing and learn lessons it can apply to
other, presumably less-hideous-looking products.

Wearable devices, all the rage at this year's South by Southwest
tech conference, will eventually be a huge market, encompassing
products from virtual-reality goggles to fitness bands to
smartwatches such as the new Apple watch and the competitor
version that Google announced this past week.

Though Glass didn't catch on, it created tremendous buzz and
established Google as a pioneer in the market.

3) Google is a leading force for diversity in Silicon Valley.

The company made news for publishing numbers on its workforce
demographics in May 2014, which encouraged Facebook and Yahoo to
follow suit.

Internally, Google has launched workshops to teach employees
about "unconscious bias," and it has donated millions since 2010
to groups that aim to get girls and women interested in tech
careers. In February, Google announced $775,000 in grants to
CODE2040, an organization trying to help more African Americans
and Latinos join the industry.

But "we're the first to admit that Google is miles from where we
want to be," the company's head of "people operations," Laszlo
Bock, said of its 2 percent black workforce, adding that "being
totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really
important part of the solution."

If Google wants to position itself as a leader on diversity, it
might consider promoting more women and minorities to positions
of power at the company.

Google's 11-member board of directors boasts only three women and
no African Americans. Its management team includes five executive
officers — all male, one black. Its senior leadership team has 15
members; only three are women, and none is African American.

Adam Berry/Getty Images

Google might also encourage one of its most powerful officers to
stop acting sexist on a national stage. Chairman Eric Schmidt was
called out this past week (by the company's "unconscious bias"
officer) for repeatedly interrupting Megan Smith, a former Google
executive who is now chief technology officer of the United
States, while Schmidt and Smith appeared on a South by Southwest
panel together.

4) Google has an unassailable monopoly on search.

Google dominates the search market so thoroughly that in 2009,
when Microsoft introduced its Bing search engine, even people who
admired the product reckoned that it didn't stand a chance.

"In 2004, if this was side-by-side with Google, it would be very
competitive. In 2009, it's not a level playing field," Alex Hoye,
head of a search engine marketing firm, told the Guardian.

He was right. Six years later, Bing has a 12 percent market share
in search, and Google has 75 percent — even greater than its
share in 2009. Other rivals keep trying to chip away — Yahoo
recently picked up a couple of market-share points and now holds
10.6 percent — but it appears that in the traditional search
engine market, the game is over, and Google has won.

The real threat to Google's search business, though, doesn't come
from Microsoft or Yahoo. It comes from Amazon and Facebook, and
from the changing habits of online shoppers.

Amazon and Facebook aren't in the search business, strictly
speaking, but increasingly people turn to these sites to learn
about products.

In other words, the challenge to Google is not that competitors
will take over the traditional search engine market but that
traditional search engines will become less relevant as search
takes place on other sites.

"Our biggest search competitor is Amazon," Schmidt acknowledged
last October. "They are obviously more focused on the commerce
side of the equation, but, at their roots, they are answering
users' questions and searches, just as we are."

Google's rivals love to play up the company's spying
capabilities. Microsoft spent millions on its "Scroogled" ad
campaign, which aimed to scare people away from a big, nefarious
company that was snooping on its users.

There is a Big Brother online, but it's not Google: It's the NSA.
The National Security Agency is the one peering into every major
tech company's systems, hoovering up personal information, and
refusing to talk about what it stole or why.

Google does gather data about people who use its services, much
like other online companies — Apple has as many as
800 million credit card numbers on file and perhaps billions
of personal photos gathered from iPhones on its iCloud service,
including numerous nude celebrity photos leaked by hackers.

The point is not that Google gathers information about people,
but rather why. The company's stated goal, and there is no
evidence to contradict it, is to deliver ads more relevant to
your interests (and ultimately charge more for these ads).

Google has responded aggressively to news about the NSA's
activities revealed in the Edward Snowden leaks, vowing to keep
developing techniques to prevent the agency from spying on people
who use its services.

Co-founder Sergey Brin, who expressed shock over the NSA's
activities, said Google has 1,000 engineers working on security
and has started encrypting data flowing across its servers.
Schmidt described its defenses as "techniques that no one
believes the NSA can break in our lifetime."

Mike Hearn, a security researcher at Google, offered this
response: "Nobody at . . . the NSA will ever stand before a judge
and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial
process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore
do what internet engineers have always done — build more secure
software."